On the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of Václav Havel. A Historiographic Review

Abstract

Literature about Václav Havel, mainly monographies published over the last 30 years in Czech and English, is reviewed and classified including the first Russian-language book about him. Four of their interpretive models are identified in comparison with time intervals: apologetic, critical, neutralist, integral. V. Havel is characterized as a new type of politician, setting examples of political activity for a whole generation of politicians in many countries of the world, in particular, leaders of Colour Revolutions in all their diversity. In general, the interpretive models of V. Havel's biography have constantly changed, not disappearing completely in the course of what can conditionally be called waves of a kind of revisionism. On the rise of his career as a statesman, the apologetic model with elements of hagiography prevailed, on the second - critical with elements of denunciation. Since about 2003, the neutralist interpretive model has become the main one, and since 2013, the integral model, a line to revisionism in interpreting its political biography. With rare exceptions, the dominance of a particular model can be discovered in works about Havel, but only praise or condemnation is rare. Most authors primarily identify or reinterpret the documentary basis and do not seek unambiguous assessments, since Havel's political biography is extremely complex. The study of the processes of reception and interpretation of Havel's figure appears as a reflection of the complexity of political portraying of a person with a contradictory biography. The degree of divergence between high ideological and moral motivations, on the one hand, and methods of ideological manipulation - on the other, this figure is perhaps the most striking. It is noted that not a single study, if it is devoted to the "velvet" revolution, the "velvet" divorce, and even more so to the four terms of the presidency in Czechoslovakia/CSFR and then in the Czech Republic, does not do without the figure of Havel.